192
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 15 Mar 2024
192 points (100.0% liked)
news
23568 readers
602 users here now
Welcome to c/news! Please read the Hexbear Code of Conduct and remember... we're all comrades here.
Rules:
-- PLEASE KEEP POST TITLES INFORMATIVE --
-- Overly editorialized titles, particularly if they link to opinion pieces, may get your post removed. --
-- All posts must include a link to their source. Screenshots are fine IF you include the link in the post body. --
-- If you are citing a twitter post as news please include not just the twitter.com in your links but also nitter.net (or another Nitter instance). There is also a Firefox extension that can redirect Twitter links to a Nitter instance: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/libredirect/ or archive them as you would any other reactionary source using e.g. https://archive.today . Twitter screenshots still need to be sourced or they will be removed --
-- Mass tagging comm moderators across multiple posts like a broken markov chain bot will result in a comm ban--
-- Repeated consecutive posting of reactionary sources, fake news, misleading / outdated news, false alarms over ghoul deaths, and/or shitposts will result in a comm ban.--
-- Neglecting to use content warnings or NSFW when dealing with disturbing content will be removed until in compliance. Users who are consecutively reported due to failing to use content warnings or NSFW tags when commenting on or posting disturbing content will result in the user being banned. --
-- Using April 1st as an excuse to post fake headlines, like the resurrection of Kissinger while he is still fortunately dead, will result in the poster being thrown in the gamer gulag and be sentenced to play and beat trashy mobile games like 'Raid: Shadow Legends' in order to be rehabilitated back into general society. --
founded 4 years ago
MODERATORS
You'd still need engines and fuel onboard, or you couldn't circularize the orbit. The idea is more just get something out of the atmosphere with something that doesn't itself have to be dragged along for the ride, then do the rest of it once you don't have atmospheric drag and you aren't fighting directly against gravity anymore.
It's kind of the same as the idea of "what if the first stage was a big air-breathing plane that just, like, flew really high and really fast?" that keeps cropping up, just finding a way to make the first part of the process less absurdly expensive.
But no matter what you can't put something into orbit with a single input of velocity unless that was enough to remove it from the Earth's sphere of influence entirely, because you can't make the lowest point in an orbit higher than the point you're currently at.
Absolutely impossible. The problem isn't the angle, the problem is that orbits are circular. The "orbit" would have to go around in circular motion until until it reaches the point where it exited the railgun (after accounting for the rotation of the earth and all the other nonsense you need to account for).
What you said, but the orbits are elliptical. The periapsis (lowest orbital altitude) would be the point where the craft exits the rail launch - located within earth's atmosphere.
I think the next evolution after the raillaunch would be a hybrid engine that breathes air and functions in a vacuum so we could have small SSTO craft.